No Man’s Sky adds new default ship controls for PC

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No Man’s Sky [official site] patch 1.37 has added a new (but toggle-able so therefore optional) ship control scheme for mouse and keyboard.

Hello Games say: “This option can be toggled, and changes ship controls to be cursor based, meaning you’ll be able to direct your ship easily using your mouse”. Pip says: “I just booted up the game and hopped in my ship, immediately becoming distracted by the new interface which is less ace piloting and more kind of like pulling a ball through the air using an elastic band?”

It might take some getting used to is what I’m saying.

Mostly I thought I’d give it a mention because it didn’t feel like a navigation type I remember from any other games and that was a curious sensation. Obviously I haven’t spent much time with it yet and might grow to love it/toggle back to the previous system and forget about it, but there’s something fantastically and noteworthily strange about the elasticity of the input and how it makes the reticle the focus of your gaze (at first, anyway) instead of your potential destinations.

The update announcement goes on to add: “In addition, PC mouse and keyboard players can now look around the ship’s cockpit by holding the ALT key. Note: This new option will be active by default, and can be toggled off by visiting the General Options menu.”

I only played this game for a bit recently, and really bounced off it. I think it was the horrible way I would select something and nothing happened – it turned out you had to hold the button sometimes (but not always) to select things. It was frustratingly slow, like Windows asking you twice if you’re sure you want to delete that file. If I press a button then let me live with the consequences of it!

I really wanted an option to also turn off lots of the popup messages, and to be able to play it offline without blocking it on the router. I don’t want to see what other people have called things.

I am looking forward to trying it out on the Oculus Rift though, via VorpX. I may still have a bad first impression, but maybe that would encourage me to stick at it. We’ll see. I wanted to like the game, which is a start.

Yeah, an entirely new way to control flight seems a bit overkill when they could be addressing more pressing interface issues.

I just want them to fix (or add an option to disable) having to hold to click. Maybe that stuff works for consoles but on PC hold-to-click is a BAD BAD input method that *never* feels natural or efficient and I don’t know how anyone ever thought that could be a good idea. There’s a reason there’s a mod to remove it:

“A black hole might save you a few jumps, but depending on how the dice treat you it could incur hours of opportunity cost. It’s not remotely worth it. Instead, it feels like a cruel prank from a game designer who wants to punish you for attempting to circumvent the grind.”

“I just spent two hours building this parking spot for myself, only to have a useless NPC steal it. I can’t boot the guy, either. I just have to wait for him to leave. Then I teleport away. The next time I teleport home, my ship is once again parked in the weeds and an alien is in my expensive parking spot.”

“This is a game about exploring 18 quintillion planets where this supposed optimal money-making technique isn’t finding rare treasure on alien worlds, but staying home and clicking on machines like you’re playing Farmville.”

“So now after spending all your money you’ve got a ship that’s broken, empty, and still ugly. And now you’ve got to spend an hour tracking down more of those rare resources to rebuild everything. Because EVERYTHING in this game revolves around the inventory system.”

“You work for hours to unlock the exocraft only to find out they’re really inconvenient and expensive to deploy, they’re difficult to use on uneven terrain, their cargo capacity is minuscule, they’re impractical to use on planets where their fuel isn’t plentiful, and their mining laser is slower than the upgraded multi-tool you’ve been using.

“Everything is like this. You’re constantly chasing one mirage after another, always hoping that on the next world you’ll find the magic upgrade or unlock the gizmo that unshackles you from the annoyances the game keeps throwing at you. But each reward is itself just a new way to annoy you.”

No Man’s Sky currently sounds like a Free To Play game where they forgot to add microtransactions that let you skip the purposely annoying parts that only exist to make you buy microtransactions.

And you know what, I had all of the same complaints as well with the game, but the fact of the matter is that every single one of them is easily addressed by mods.

Tired of the grindy nature of the game? Try the Common Traveler mod which makes the game more about exploring and less about crafting warp cells. There’s mods to adjust flight and ground vehicle controls to make them faster, more responsive and more fun overall.

By far the best mod out there though to address 95% of your concerns however, would be Rayrod’s overhaul. It’s a compilation of around a hundred mods combined with the author’s own complete reworking of the biome system, and has various modules so you can tweak it to the only the features you want. He bumps the game up from a mere 30 biomes to around 260, and tweaks the terrain generation so that you’ll now find planets with massive mountains, steep cliffs, weird canyons, giant holes in the ground that go down hundreds of feet where a base or cave might be hidden halfway through, and of course real actual oceans and interesting underwater areas.

Every single planet I now visit is unique, and the pop-in and fade is much less aggressive as you can now see trees and objects from miles away, along with a new dense/tall grass system and the option to have biomes which use random color schemes which yields for some really cool/weird worlds. Flora density varies now, with some planets sparse like the original game, some mixed between fields and forests, and some with very dense jungles/forests which are difficult to even walk through.

I recently found a lush planets that was half mountainous/valley with small lakes in between the terrain, while the other side of the planet mostly oceans with some islands, a combo of red and yellow grass, a purple sky, all purple trees and there was a single giant purple “Deku Tree” as I call it in the middle of the world which towered over everything.

On top of that the rover vehicle is about 10x faster, costs only 10 iron to summon on a world, and is now nearly as fast at exploring a planet as flying around. Give it a try if you’ve given up on the game as it’s honestly like I’m playing a totally different game now, and a lot closer to what was originally promised. Plus I can now make a fortune just trading rare items from system to system without needing to build some massive farming base and instead gaming the economy.

The game is utterly ugly on a 3440×1440 resolution. The rendering is super different depending on what AA you set, like a different game.
And it runs like crap while being so ugly.
It takes 3 minutes to relaunch the game and try different settings.

I reinstalled it 2 times I. A year and bounced hard of it because of these issues only, combined with the awful memory of its shallowness.

And this remark isn’t about the game itself or its perceived quality, but the way it was marketed, the lies, and the attention it got. Why??

Why do you all talk about it? It’s just a game, the one that’s unworthy, generic, and shallow at its best. Why can’t we just acknowledge that we all liked the premise but that this particular incarnation isn’t exactly what we had in mind.

Why is Hello Games rich now? For doing what?
Explain to yourselves that you’ve all made a monster rich.

While all the really cool kids (i.e. actual game designers) are left in the dust, to contemplate idiocy that has completely taken control over the world. That’s why we can’t have good things in life.

This game is an embarassment for the human marketplace. A measure of global IQ.

– How smart are you?
– 1 and a half No Man’s Skys.
– Wow, pretty good. So you wouldn’t buy it?
– It’s good when modded. I like my time completely wasted.
– Oh.

Because the word fits their outlook and performance so far.
Hello Games are clumsy as well as unrefined in their endeavors, while the money they’ve gathered makes them as much as powerful as they are hideous in how they’ve manipulated the crowd.

A certain mutant spawned out from sheer impatience, misapplied technologies, grotesque design, and fucked up publicity.